Despite the many years of development of holsters for sporting and military use, there has yet to be achieved a holster totally suitable for use by a military man as an ambidextrous belt holster suitable for wide and narrow belts and also adaptable as a shoulder holster. A large variety of holsters have been developed, each with a design to fit a single weapon and to be worn in one or possible two different methods, for example, side draw or cross draw.
In U.S. Pat. No. 3,688,953 of one of the co-inventors hereof, the first ambidextrous military holster was developed. It was designed to be worn on either a standard or web pistol belt up to 21/4 inches wide or a narrower garrison or trousers belt. The holster could be worn either left handed or right handed, front or cross draw. The co-pending application Ser. No. 575,313, filed Jan. 30, 1984, discloses a further development in adaptable ambidextrous holsters including an adjustable height feature. These both constituted remarkable advances in the state of the art; however, neither are fully adaptable to a variety of sizes of weapons, exhibited some excess bulkiness and are not adapted to shoulder harness wear.
The need to provide an ambidextrous holster to account for the significant number of left-handed shooters continues to exist for shoulder holster wearers as it did prior to the invention of the ambidextrous belt holster disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,668,953 above.
Any shoulder holster, to meet universal needs for the military, likewise needs to be wearable for both left-hand, crossdraw and right-hand, crossdraw. A further need exists for a reliable, comfortable ambidextrous leg holster.
In the interest of minimization of military supply requirements, it would be desirable that a single holster be usable in many different modes of wearing, namely when belt worn, left-hand sidedraw, right-hand sidedraw, left-hand crossdraw and right-hand crossdraw. When shoulder worn, it would be desirable to be usable in left-hand crossdraw or right-hand crossdraw. In any mode, the holster may be worn with or without the flap or safety strap.
The primary function of the holster is to safely carry a handgun and to allow it to be brought into use effectively, rapidly and without interference while the handgun is being drawn. A further requirement being imposed upon the military is that in strenous activity such as jumping in and out of a helicopter, or entering or leaving the confined quarters of a tank or other motorized vehicle, that the holster not interfere with that movement and also that the handgun not be dislodged by contact of the holster with any part of the vehicle or any other object during the military man's maneuver.
Because of these needs, holsters have characteristically included either a flap or safety strap and have been custom designed to fit a particular weapon with precise shaping of the handgun pouch to fit the particular weapon and barrel length. Such a design criteria is inconsistent with the need to produce a universal military holster which could carry a variety of different model handguns. In one previous holster, a movable welt has been used to adapt the holster to different size handguns.